Reaching parity with QuickBooks Simple Start
QuickBooks Online Simple Start is the package a one-person business reaches for first. This chapter sets out exactly what it does, measures our hosted SQL-Ledger against it line by line, and ends with the eleven enhancements that make the two equivalent — while keeping everything SQL-Ledger already does that Simple Start cannot.
1.1Why this comparison
When a prospect asks whether Ledger123 can replace QuickBooks, they almost never mean the Plus or Advanced tiers. They mean the plan on the front of the pricing page: Simple Start, one user, US$38 a month since the August 2026 price rise, sold on invoicing, bank feeds and a tidy set of reports. Everything below it (Solopreneur) is single-entry bookkeeping with no balance sheet; everything above it (Essentials, from US$85) starts adding what SQL-Ledger has had for twenty years. So Simple Start is the right yardstick: it is the smallest package that is a real set of books, and it is the one people compare us to.
| Plan | Price | Users | What defines it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solopreneur Free / Lite | $0 / $20 | 1 | Single-entry; P&L only, no balance sheet, fixed chart |
| Simple Start | $38 | 1 + 2 accountants | Double-entry, invoicing, bank feeds, 20-odd reports |
| Essentials | $85 | 3 | Adds bills/AP, recurring, time, multi-currency |
| Plus | $140 | 5 | Adds inventory, projects, POs, budgets, classes |
| Advanced | $340 | 25 | Adds batch invoicing, custom roles, workflows |
Payroll is an add-on at every tier (from $50 + $6.50 per employee). Card payments on invoices cost 2.99%, bank transfers 1%.
1.2What Simple Start actually contains
Stripped of marketing, the plan is six things. The list matters because the boundary with Essentials is drawn in surprising places — recurring invoices, for instance, are not in Simple Start while progress invoicing is; Intuit’s documented workaround is to copy last month’s invoice by hand.
aSelling
- Unlimited invoices from customisable templates (logo, colours, one custom field per transaction).
- Estimates that convert into invoices.
- A Pay now link on every emailed invoice, taking card and bank transfer through QuickBooks Payments, with the receipt matched to the invoice automatically.
- Automatic reminders before and after the due date, with an editable message.
- Partial payments, printed cheques, and a customer list with balances and contact details.
- Progress invoicing: an estimate billed in stages, by percentage or amount.
- absent recurring invoices, batch invoicing.
bSales tax
- Automated US sales tax: the rate is looked up from the customer’s address, applied on the invoice, accrued to a liability, and reported on a Sales Tax Liability report with a due-date reminder.
- Outside the US the same slot holds VAT/GST: the UK edition files Making Tax Digital VAT returns to HMRC; the Australian edition lodges a Simpler BAS to the ATO.
cMoney in and out of the bank
- Unlimited bank and card feeds, with rules that categorise recurring lines automatically and AI suggestions for the rest.
- Receipt capture: photograph a receipt in the mobile app or forward it by email; OCR fills in the vendor, date and amount and matches it to the bank line.
- Bank reconciliation with a reconciliation report.
- Mileage tracking from the phone’s GPS, swipe to classify business or personal.
- Income and expense categorisation with US Schedule C tax-deduction categories.
dBuying
- A vendor list, vendor contact and transaction reports, basic bill entry and Bill Pay Basic.
- 1099 contractor tracking and e-filing.
- absent the full accounts-payable workflow — bill status, AP ageing, scheduled and batch payments are Essentials.
eReports
Intuit lists roughly twenty-two: Balance Sheet (and detail/comparison), Profit & Loss (and comparison, % of income), Statement of Cash Flows, Trial Balance, General Ledger, Journal, Account List, Audit Log, Reconciliation, Sales Tax Liability, A/R Summary, Customer Balance Summary, Collections, Open Invoices, Invoice List, Invoices and Received Payments, Sales by Customer, Sales by Product/Service, Customer and Vendor Contact Lists, Transaction List by Vendor, Check Detail. Each can be customised and bundled into a “management report” pack. A ninety-day Cash Flow Planner is on every plan.
fPlatform
- One billed user plus two accountant seats; no read-only or time-only seats.
- A chart of accounts capped at 250; zero classes or locations; one custom field.
- A business-overview dashboard, an audit log, an iOS/Android app, and the app store of 750-plus integrations.
1.3Where our SQL-Ledger stands
The table below takes every capability in section 1.2 and marks what the hosted install does today. The install is SQL-Ledger 3.2.12 with the Ledger123 enhancements: the Bootstrap 5 interface, the usability pass, the storefront with its Stripe and PayPal checkout, the redesigned document templates, the persistent application server, and the registry-database logins and sessions. Three marks are used.
have equivalent or better, nothing to build partial the substance exists but not the automation or the shape a Simple Start user expects build absent
| Simple Start capability | Ours | Where it is, or what is missing |
|---|---|---|
| Selling | ||
| Unlimited invoices, customisable templates | have | Sales invoice, credit invoice, credit note; per-dataset HTML and LaTeX templates in the customer’s language, 25 documents redesigned this month. |
| Estimate → invoice | have | Quotation → sales order → invoice, with partial shipment and consolidation on the way. |
| Recurring invoices | have | Recurring Transactions on any invoice, order or journal entry. Simple Start does not have this at all. |
| Pay-now link on the invoice | build | The storefront takes Stripe and PayPal, but an emailed invoice carries no payment link and no receipt posts itself. |
| Automatic payment reminders | partial | AR → Reports → Reminder builds reminder letters, but a person must run it and send them. |
| Progress invoicing from an estimate | partial | A sales order is invoiced in as many parts as it takes, by quantity shipped per line; billing a percentage of the whole is not a shape we offer. Taken up in chapter 3. |
| Partial payments, printed cheques | have | Cash → Receipt against any open invoices; cheque printing with void and reissue. |
| Customer list with balances | have | Customers → Reports → Search, History; AR Aging. |
| Sales tax | ||
| Tax calculated on the invoice, accrued, reported | have | Tax accounts with rates and validity dates, per-customer and per-item taxability, Tax Collected and Tax Paid reports. |
| Rate looked up from the address | build | Rates are assigned, not looked up. Only matters for US multi-jurisdiction sellers. |
| Period tax return (VAT/GST/sales tax) | partial | The figures exist across Tax Collected and Tax Paid; there is no single return-shaped report for a period, and no filing. |
| Bank | ||
| Bank and card feeds with rules | build | No statement import of any kind; every bank line is keyed. |
| Receipt capture with OCR | build | Reference Documents can attach a file to a transaction, but nothing reads the file or creates the transaction. |
| Bank reconciliation with report | partial | Cash → Reconciliation ticks off ledger lines against a statement balance; reconciliation report exists. Works, but row identity is fragile and there is no statement to reconcile against. |
| Mileage tracking | build | Absent. See 1.5 on whether to build it. |
| Expense categorisation | have | A full chart of accounts, unlimited, with departments and projects on every line — Simple Start allows 250 accounts and zero classes. |
| Buying | ||
| Vendor list and reports | have | Vendors, AP transactions, AP Aging, Outstanding, History. |
| Bills and bill payment | have | Full AP with vouchers and batch payment — this is Essentials territory in QuickBooks. |
| 1099 contractor reporting | build | No vendor tax-form flag, no year-end totals by box. |
| Reports | ||
| Balance Sheet, P&L with comparison | have | Reports → Balance Sheet, Income Statement, both with a comparison period; restyled this month. |
| Trial Balance, General Ledger, Journal, Account List | have | Trial Balance, GL report (now with account names and entry order), Chart of Accounts. |
| Statement of Cash Flows | build | Absent. |
| Cash Flow Planner | build | Absent. |
| Audit log | partial | System → Audit Log reads it, but the trail is switched on per dataset under Audit Control and can be cleared. |
| AR summary, open invoices, invoice list, collections, customer balance | have | AR Transactions, Outstanding, Aging, Reminder, all with chosen columns, sort and subtotals. |
| Sales by customer, by product/service | have | Customer History; Goods & Services reports by item with sold quantities and revenue. |
| Contact lists, transaction list by vendor, cheque detail | have | Customer/Vendor Search, Vendor History, Cash → Reports → Payments. |
| Reports exported to a spreadsheet | partial | The financial statements export CSV; the transaction reports do not. |
| Platform | ||
| Users and accountant access | partial | Unlimited logins with named roles (System → Roles), but access control only hides menu entries; there is no true read-only seat for an accountant. |
| Dashboard | partial | The home screen now lists recent work and shortcuts; it shows no figures. |
| Custom field on a transaction | build | Only the fixed fields (notes, intnotes, PO number, shipping point) — nothing user-defined. |
| Mobile app | partial | Bootstrap 5 makes the screens usable on a tablet; the frameset and dense grids are not phone-friendly, and there is no native app. |
| Integrations, app store | partial | A documented PostgreSQL schema, CSV import and export, the storefront. No HTTP API for third parties. |
Of thirty-three capabilities, fourteen we have, ten are partial, nine we must build. The gap is not the ledger — on posting, reporting, tax, payables, recurring documents, multi-currency, inventory, projects and users we already sit at Essentials or Plus. The gap is the layer that touches the world outside the ledger: the bank, the customer’s wallet, the phone camera, the tax office. That is where every one of the nine build items lives.
1.4The eleven enhancements
Ordered by how much of the gap each closes per unit of work. The first four are the ones a Simple Start user would notice missing on day one; the last four are the ones an accountant would.
1Bank statement import and matching
The single largest gap. A new Cash → Import Statement screen accepts
CSV, OFX/QFX and CAMT.053 for a chosen bank account, stores the lines in a
bankline table keyed by account, date, amount and a bank reference so a
re-import is idempotent, then presents each line with a suggested match: an open
invoice or bill of the same amount, a prior categorisation of the same payee, or a
rule. Accepting a match posts the receipt or payment through the existing
CP code; a rule (payee pattern → account, tax, department) is saved on
the spot. Reconciliation then reconciles against the imported statement rather than a
typed closing balance, which also fixes its fragile row identity. Live feeds — an
aggregator such as Salt Edge, GoCardless Bank Account Data or Plaid — are a
second phase that drops files into the same table on a schedule.
2Pay-now links on invoices
The storefront already holds working Stripe Checkout and PayPal Orders code
(interchange.pl). Lift the gateway calls into SL/Pay.pm, give
each posted invoice a signed token, and put a Pay this invoice URL into the
emailed invoice and the printed template as a QR code. The link opens a small
public page under the appserver showing the invoice, takes the card or bank transfer,
and on the gateway webhook posts a receipt against the invoice into the payment
account configured for the gateway, net of fee, with the fee to a bank-charges account.
Gateway keys live per dataset in defaults, as they do for the shop.
3Automatic reminders
The Reminder report already selects the overdue invoices and the letter templates exist. Add per-customer reminder settings (days before due, days after, escalation level, on/off) and a scheduled job on the appserver host that runs the same selection nightly and mails each letter with the pay-now link from enhancement 2. Every send is logged against the invoice so the AR screen shows “reminded 3 Aug, 17 Aug”.
4Receipt capture
Two intakes and one queue. Intake one is an upload button on the AP and GL screens
and a drop zone on the dashboard; intake two is a per-dataset address
(receipts-<dataset>@…) that the existing mail relay delivers
to. Each file goes through OCR — Tesseract locally, or a document-AI API for
accuracy — and lands in an Inbox as a draft with vendor, date, total and
tax pre-filled and the image alongside. The user picks the account and posts; the file
is attached as a reference document. Matching to a bank line from enhancement 1
closes the loop.
5Statement of Cash Flows
Indirect method from what the ledger already holds: net income from the income
statement, adjusted by the period movement on each balance-sheet account grouped by
a new cash-flow category on the chart (operating, investing, financing), with the
cash accounts reconciling the top and bottom. One report in SL/RP.pm
alongside the balance sheet, same comparison-period and department controls, same
CSV export.
6Cash flow planner and dashboard figures
A ninety-day projection needs only what we have: cash balances today, open AR by due date, open AP by due date, and the next occurrences of every recurring transaction. Draw it as one line on the dashboard with the three inputs beneath, let the user add what-if rows (a purchase, a hire, a loan), and store those in a small table. The same screen carries the figures a dashboard is expected to show: cash in bank, receivables due this month, payables due this month, sales this month versus last, and the top five overdue customers with a one-click reminder.
7Audit log made mandatory, and CSV on every report
Two small things an accountant checks first. The audit trail becomes always-on and append-only (drop the delete path, guard with a trigger); the existing System → Audit Log screen stays as the way to read it. Separately, the CSV option the financial statements already have is wired into the transaction reports in AR, AP, GL and Cash, so every report opens in a spreadsheet.
8An accountant seat, and access control that enforces
Simple Start’s two accountant seats are read-everything, post-nothing users.
We have unlimited logins and named roles, but the access list only filters the menu. Enforce
acs at dispatch (the item already on the backlog), add a
read-only flag on the member row that refuses every posting action, and add
a one-click Invite your accountant on the panel that creates such a login.
This is also the moment to give the accountant the bundled “management
report”: balance sheet, income statement, trial balance, aging and the new cash
flow statement as one PDF for a period.
9Custom fields
One user-defined field per transaction is Simple Start’s whole offering here,
and it is cheap to beat. A customfield definition table (module, label,
type, optional dropdown values) and a customvalue table keyed by
trans_id; the AR/AP/invoice/order screens render the defined fields, the
transaction reports offer them as columns and filters, and the templates expose them
as <%customfield_name%>. Departments and projects stay as they are
— they already give us what QuickBooks sells as classes and locations at the
Plus tier.
10A phone-sized interface for the daily tasks
Not a native app: the appserver already serves the whole application as HTML, so the route is a responsive single-document layout (the frameset retired, the menu as an off-canvas drawer) plus a handful of screens redrawn for a narrow viewport — new invoice, receive payment, capture receipt, the dashboard, the customer list. Installable as a progressive web app so it has an icon and opens full-screen. The dense reports stay desktop screens and scroll sideways on a phone, which is what QuickBooks’ app does too.
11Tax returns and 1099s
Two country-specific reports built on one period-tax engine. The engine lists, for a period, tax collected and tax paid by tax account, the taxable base, the non-taxable base, and the net position, with drill-down to the transactions and a lock date once filed. On top of it: a UK VAT return (the nine MTD boxes, with HMRC submission through the MTD VAT API as a follow-on), an Australian BAS, a Pakistani sales-tax return, and a US sales-tax liability by jurisdiction. The 1099 piece is a tax form flag and tax ID on the vendor record, a per-vendor calendar-year total of payments by 1099 box, and a report that prints or exports the totals. US address-based rate lookup is deliberately left out: it needs a paid rates API and only US multi-state sellers want it.
1.5What we will not build
Mileage tracking. GPS logging is a phone feature, not a ledger feature, and its accounting output is one journal entry a month. A phone app that logs trips and posts that entry is the enhancement-10 layout plus a form; we will offer a manual mileage entry there and stop.
An app store. Simple Start’s 750 integrations are mostly ways to get data in and out. The JSON API on the backlog (invoices, payments, balances, customers) with token authentication is the honest equivalent; we will build that, and integrations onto it as customers ask.
US automated tax rates. Deferred, as above, until a US customer with multi-state sales asks.
1.6What Simple Start cannot do that we already do
Worth putting on the comparison page, because it changes the question from “can it replace QuickBooks?” to “which QuickBooks?”.
| Ours today | First QuickBooks tier that has it |
|---|---|
| Recurring invoices, bills and journal entries | Essentials, $85 |
| Full accounts payable with vouchers, batch payment, AP ageing | Essentials |
| Unlimited users | 3 at Essentials, 25 at Advanced, $340 |
| Multi-currency with FX adjustment | Essentials |
| Time cards on projects and jobs | Essentials |
| Inventory, assemblies, kits, warehouses, COGS | Plus, $140 (no assemblies at any tier) |
| Purchase orders, sales orders, quotations, RFQs | Plus (no RFQs at any tier) |
| Projects and jobs with costing | Plus |
| Departments on every line (their classes and locations) | Plus, capped at 40 |
| Unlimited chart of accounts | Advanced |
| Batch invoicing and batch printing | Advanced |
| Point of sale, payroll, storefront, own database | Add-ons or never |
Build the bank layer, the payment link, the reminders and the receipt inbox, add a cash flow statement and planner, harden the audit trail and the accountant seat, and Ledger123 is a Simple Start equivalent sitting on an Essentials-and-Plus ledger.
1.7Sources
Intuit’s own pages were consulted for the feature and limit statements; independent reviewers for pricing history and the Simple Start / Essentials boundary. Prices are US list as of 1 August 2026.
- Intuit, Reports included in your QuickBooks Online subscription — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/purchase-orders/reports-included-quickbooks-online-subscription/L0s4KrGgr_US_en_US
- Intuit, Learn about usage limits in QuickBooks Online — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/intuit-subscriptions/learn-usage-limits-quickbooks-online/L6THMltE4_US_en_US
- Intuit, Are recurring transactions included with Simple Start? — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/banking/are-recurring-transactions-included-with-quicken-online-simple/00/1282373
- Intuit, Send invoice reminders automatically or manually — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/invoicing/send-invoice-reminders-automatically-manually/L84cQjpxo_US_en_US
- Intuit, Set up and use automated sales tax — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/sales-taxes/set-use-automated-sales-tax-quickbooks-online/L4Lx8eL7V_US_en_US
- Intuit, Use the Cash Flow Planner — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/budget-planning/use-cash-flow-planner-quickbooks-online/L3pbHqdoF_US_en_US
- Intuit, Use the audit log — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/audit-log/use-audit-log-quickbooks-online/L2WoVnW6I_US_en_US
- Intuit, Introduction to QuickBooks Solopreneur — quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/help-article/compare-products/introduction-quickbooks-solopreneur/L8TodvTOE_US_en_US
- Intuit, Simple Start product page — qbdtipd.qbinproduct.intuit.com/online/qbo-simple-start/
- Intuit UK and AU, MTD VAT and Simpler BAS — mtd.digital/quickbooks-mtd/ · quickbooks.intuit.com/au/gst-and-bas/
- Certum Solutions, QuickBooks price increase August 2026 — certumsolutions.com/library/quickbooks-price-increase-august-2026
- Fourlane, QuickBooks Online pricing changes 2026 — fourlane.com/quickbooks-online-pricing-changes-2026-new-rates-and-fourlane-discounts/
- NerdWallet, QuickBooks Online pricing — nerdwallet.com/business/software/learn/quickbooks-pricing
- Fit Small Business, QuickBooks Online comparison — fitsmallbusiness.com/quickbooks-online-comparison/
- Fondo, Simple Start vs Essentials — fondo.com/blog/quickbooks-online-simple-start-vs-essentials
- Earmark, QuickBooks Online tags retiring — earmarkcpe.com/quickbooks-online-tags-retiring-may-15-how-to-migrate-your-data-now/
- Ledger123, SQL-Ledger 3.2.12 improvement backlog (doc/todo.md in the sql-ledger repository), items 13, 22, 25, 27, 29, 34, 35, 36, 45, 46, 47.